Finland and Sweden Debate NATO

Membership

Summary

The
West's standoff with Russia over Ukraine is triggering debate over the
adequacy of defense spending and cooperation to confront a more
assertive Russia across Europe. In Finland and Sweden, an important
element in this debate is whether the two countries should join NATO.

While the
events in Ukraine strengthen the argument for NATO membership, general
support for the idea is still lacking in both countries -- such a step
would represent a big shift from Finland's and Sweden's strategy of
avoiding too strong a military alignment with the West in order to
prevent any conflict with Russia.

Only if
the crisis in Ukraine persists, and if Russia grows more assertive in
the Baltics, might public opinion in Sweden and Finland shift strongly
enough to make NATO membership likely. Before joining NATO, the two
countries would try to strengthen regional collaboration and bolster
their own national defenses.

Analysis

The
standoff between the West and Russia is increasingly affecting Nordic
Europe. On April 15, the Barents Observer reported that politicians in
Norway are debating whether plans to cooperate with Russia on
hydrocarbons exploration along the countries' shared border should be
put on hold in light of the events in Ukraine. In Finland and Sweden,
the crisis is fueling the debate over eventual NATO membership. Finland
and Sweden are both members of the European Union, and thus have tight
economic and institutional bonds with the West, but both have stayed out
of NATO.

Sweden,
after suffering great territorial losses to Russia in the early 19th
century, has abided by a neutrality policy since the end of the
Napoleonic wars. It maintained that policy at least nominally throughout
the two world wars, though it did provide economic and logistical
assistance to the Germans, the Allies and the Finns in World War II.
Neutrality was meant as a way to minimize the risk of further defeats
comparable to the ones Sweden was dealt in the early 1800s.

Image: The Nordic Countries and Russia

Finland,
the only Nordic eurozone member and a country that shares a long border
with Russia, was once absorbed by the Russian Empire, remaining Russian
territory for more than a century before declaring independence in 1917.
Finland aligned with Germany during World War II to fight the Soviets
but ultimately could not recover the territory it lost during the Winter
War in 1939 and 1940.

These
experiences strongly influenced the Finns' strategy in dealing with
their eastern neighbor. During the Cold War, Finland and the Soviet
Union had an understanding that Moscow would accept Finland's
independence as long as Helsinki abstained from stronger military
integration with the West. Finland, since the breakup of the Soviet
Union, has integrated institutionally with Western Europe and has
procured a growing proportion of its weapons from the West. Much like
Stockholm, Helsinki has established strong ties with NATO through joint
missions and training. Still, unwilling to sour its relationship with
Russia, Finland has abstained from formally joining the military
alliance.

As a
result of the past decades of European integration and collaboration
with NATO -- for example in Afghanistan -- the nonalignment policy in
both countries has been a constant issue of debate and is drawing
renewed attention as a consequence of the tensions with Russia.

Lacking Support

The
Finnish and Swedish political elite has been split over the question of
NATO membership for a long time. Governments, including those run by
parties that advocate NATO membership, have refrained from holding a
referendum on the question due to general public opposition in both
countries to joining the military alliance.

In a poll
carried out in late 2013, about one-third of Swedes supported NATO
membership. In Finland, a poll carried out online of members of the
Finnish Reservists' Association (conscripts who have finished their
military service) in early April indicated that more than 40 percent
would like Finland to join NATO within a few years. According to Finnish
media, this is a 10 percentage point jump from a similar poll conducted
a year ago. The increase was probably strongly influenced by the events
in Ukraine. Polls from the general public give far lower numbers. A
February poll, commissioned before Russia annexed Crimea, showed that
less than 20 percent of Finns favored NATO membership, a percentage
comparable to the levels in 2002, Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat
reported.

A number
of factors explain the middling support for NATO membership in Finland
and Sweden. Russia is Finland's greatest security concern, but it is
also an important economic partner -- one with which Helsinki hopes to
maintain a stable relationship. According to Trade Map, Russia was
Finland's second-largest import and export market in 2013, behind
Sweden. Russia would not likely use its military to keep Finland from
joining NATO, but Moscow would probably implement policies that would
hurt Finland economically. With Europe going through a structural economic crisis and Finland itself caught in the midst of an economic crisis,
keeping good economic ties with Russia is of particular importance.
Sweden would face fewer repercussions than Finland, because it does not
share a border with Russia. Sweden and Finland would likely coordinate
efforts to join NATO, but membership remains unlikely until other
revisions in defense policy have been made.

Debates
over Swedish and Finnish defense policy are gaining more attention
because of the crisis in Ukraine, but NATO membership is just one
element. The core question under debate is whether the Swedish and
Finnish governments should focus more on protecting their own borders
after years of defense spending cuts and foreign engagement. While there
is growing support for higher defense spending, this does not
necessarily translate into greater enthusiasm to join NATO because it is
debatable whether formal accession would add much in terms of national
security.

The
current status of Finland's and Sweden's relationships with NATO allows
both to show their commitment to certain Western allies without having
obligations toward all NATO members. Sweden and Finland, despite their
nonalignment, could also likely count on material assistance from NATO
and European partner countries in case of a military conflict because of
their geographic position. It is difficult to imagine a scenario in
which Sweden or Finland were attacked and the NATO members surrounding
it simply stood by. Seeing security in the Baltic Sea region threatened,
NATO member states would probably be drawn into any such conflict.

Before
formally considering NATO membership, Sweden and Finland will seek
stronger regional defense collaboration. The five Nordic countries --
Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland -- have a relatively long
history of collaboration since they share similar geopolitical concerns.
In the late 1940s, the Nordic countries considered forming a defense
union, but differences among the countries, the presence of NATO and the
strengthening of the European institutions weakened Nordic
collaboration. However, in recent years, the will for stronger regional
defense collaboration has seen somewhat of a revival through the
establishment of the Nordic Defense Cooperation.

This
collaboration could strengthen, but its growth will depend on how NATO
evolves as a consequence of the current crisis in Ukraine. The
difficulty for Sweden and Finland will be to get the other Nordic
countries to commit to further regional collaboration. Norway, Iceland
and Denmark already are NATO members and hence see less urgency to build
an additional alliance. Such an alliance would be particularly
de-emphasized if the United States made moves to strengthen NATO. Other
regional defense cooperation initiatives, such as the cooperation among the Visegrad states,
are dealing with similar issues -- countries see that NATO's weaknesses
could be corrected through regional cooperation platforms, but the
countries have different national security concerns, slowing efforts to
build alliance mechanisms. Stalling collaboration among the Nordic
countries would perhaps increase the support for NATO membership in
Sweden and Finland.

Moscow is
watching events in Nordic Europe with worry, although the debate over
Finnish and Swedish NATO membership could quickly die down if the crisis
in Ukraine does not escalate further. Russia knows there is a great
risk that the more aggressive it is in its periphery, the more a
rationale will exist for stronger U.S. military involvement in Eastern
Europe, or for a strengthening of military alliances among European
countries.

miércoles, 16 de abril de 2014

“The Asian Status Quo”

By Robert D. Kaplan and Matt Gertken

Arguably the greatest book on political realism in the 20th century was University of Chicago Professor Hans J. Morgenthau's Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace,
published in 1948. In that seminal work, Morgenthau defines the status
quo as "the maintenance of the distribution of power that exists at a
particular moment in history." In other words, things shall stay as they
are. But it is not quite that clear. For as Morgenthau also explains,
"the concept of the 'status quo' derives from status quo ante bellum,"
which, in turn, implies a return to the distribution of power before a
war. The war's aggressor shall give up his conquered territory, and
everything will return to how it was.

The
status quo also connotes the victors' peace: a peace that may be
unfair, or even oppressive, but at the same time stands for stability.
For a change in the distribution of power, while at times just
in a moral sense, simply introduces a measure of instability into the
geopolitical equation. And because stability has a moral value all its
own, the status quo is sanctified in the international system.

Let us apply this to Asia.

Because
Japan was the aggressor in World War II and was vanquished by the U.S.
military, it lay prostrate after the war, so that the Pacific Basin
became a virtual American naval lake.
That was the status quo as it came to be seen. This situation was
buttressed by the decades-long reclusiveness of the Pacific's largest
and most populous nation: China. Japanese occupation and civil war left
China devastated. The rise to power of Mao Zedong's communists in 1949
would keep the country preoccupied with itself for decades as it fell
prey to destructive development and political schemes such as the Great
Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. China was not weak, as the
United States would discover in the Korean and Vietnamese wars and later
turn to its advantage against the Soviets. But its revolution remained
unfinished. The economy did not truly start to develop until the late
1970s, after Mao died. And only in the mid-1990s did China begin its
naval expansion in a demonstrable and undeniable way. Thus the United
States, in its struggle with the Soviets, got used to a reclusive China
and a subordinate Japan. With these two certainties underlying the Cold
War's various animosities, the United States preserved calm in its lake.

But
the 21st century has not been kind to this status quo, however
convenient it may have been for American interests. China's naval, air,
cyber and ballistic missile buildup over the past two decades has not
yet challenged U.S. military supremacy in the region, but it has encroached significantly
on the previously unipolar environment. Moreover, to measure China's
progress against U.S. supremacy is to neglect the primary regional
balance of power between China and Japan. Tokyo, over the same time
period, has come to see China as reaching a sort of critical mass and
has accelerated its own military preparations,
both in a quantitative and a qualitative sense. Recently, Tokyo has
taken to trumpeting its abandonment of quasi-pacifism in order to adjust
the world's expectations to what it sees as a new reality. Japan was
already a major naval power -- it ranks fourth in total naval tonnage,
has more destroyers than any navy besides that of the United States, and
its technology and traditions give it a special edge. But now it is
moving faster to loosen restrictions on its rules of engagement and to
upgrade the capabilities it needs to defend its most distant island
holdings.

While
Beijing sees Japan's actions as aggressive, it is primarily China that
is altering the status quo. No doubt Japan was once the region's most
ambitious and belligerent power, and no doubt China cannot assume good
intentions, but Japan's current military normalization has little in
common with its 1930s militarization, and Tokyo is for the moment mostly
reacting to Beijing. China, for instance, has largely succeeded in
shaping a global narrative of a legitimate dispute over islands in the
East China Sea.

But Japan has controlled the Senkaku islands (known as
Diaoyu in Chinese) for more than 40 years, and China has only recently
asserted its claims. Japan's other territorial disputes, by contrast,
show a continuation of the status quo: Russia administers the southern
Kuril islands but sees Japan offering dialogue while moving military
forces away from that border; South Korea controls the Liancourt Rocks,
but any feared Japanese appetite for overturning that status quo remains
in check by the Americans. Nor were Japan's sea-lanes under any
conceivable threat of interference from China until recently. Keep in
mind that Japan's supply line anxieties are inherent to its geopolitical
position.

Indeed,
in the eyes of the Pentagon, Japan now has every reason to tailor its
military capabilities in order to take precautions against China's rise.
For years U.S. defense officials have argued that a stronger Japan
would help ensure China's peaceful ascent. Only a few years ago, defense
officials and think tank analysts in Washington were fretting that the
Japanese might not muster the courage to stand up to China. The
explanation for all this is clear: Almost seven decades of U.S. military
presence in Japan has created, on an emotional level, a powerful Japan
lobby within the American military and on the Pentagon's E-Ring. This
was further buttressed during the Rumsfeld years, when the United States
encouraged Japan to spend billions of dollars on defending itself
against North Korean missiles and to host a U.S. nuclear-powered
aircraft carrier strike group, despite Japan's neuralgic attitude toward
nuclear weapons at the time. (See "What Rumsfeld Got Right," by Robert
D. Kaplan, The Atlantic,
July 2008.)

From a purely geopolitical point of view, a more assertive
Japan could someday revive an old threat to the United States, since both are maritime powers.
But for now, Washington sees immediate benefits in Japan's growing
willingness to defend itself rather than rely so heavily on the United
States.

The
real danger Japan poses to the Americans is that attempting to
establish a formidable defensive posture could provoke China into a
dangerous escalation that, in turn, could ensnare the United States in a
confrontation with the latter.

While
Japan reacts to a changing of the status quo, China is aware of its own
role as an agent of change. Beijing knows that it is an emerging power.
It knows that emerging powers disrupt the international system. But it
needs to buy time, since it isn't ready to confront directly and
unapologetically the American-led status quo in the Pacific. China's
lack of readiness is heightened by the precarious consolidation of
political power and economic reforms that the Xi Jinping administration
has undertaken out of necessity.

China thus seeks a "new kind of major
country relationship," a phrase Chinese and American diplomats have
taken to repeating, whereby the two countries will find some way of
accommodating each other to China's military emergence without causing
the disruption and conflict that history books suggest is inevitable.
The problem with this rhetoric is that, as the Napoleonic Wars and World
War I showed, the awareness that a collapsing status quo often precedes a bellum
is not the same thing as collective action on all sides to reform the
old status quo. Knowing theoretically what causes wars -- though good in
and of itself and a prerequisite for prudent statecraft -- is not the
same as sacrificing some portion of one's own interests to try to
prevent them.

The
United States must try both to accommodate rising Chinese power and to
fortify U.S. allies in response to it. But it acts from a position of
military security that Japan -- not to mention China's smaller neighbors
-- cannot assume. Regardless of whether Japan overcorrects, the status
quo in the Pacific is changing. And the stability of the region can no
longer be taken for granted.

domingo, 13 de abril de 2014

Grand Visions Fizzle in Brazil

By SIMON ROMERO
Photographs by DANIEL BEREHULAK

PAULISTANA, Brazil April 12, 2014

Brazil plowed billions of dollars
into building a railroad across arid backlands, only for the
long-delayed project to fall prey to metal scavengers. Curvaceous new
public buildings designed by the famed architect Oscar Niemeyer were
abandoned right after being constructed. There was even an ill-fated
U.F.O. museum built with federal funds. Its skeletal remains now sit
like a lost ship among the weeds.

As Brazil sprints to get ready for the World Cup in June, it has run
up against a catalog of delays, some caused by deadly construction
accidents at stadiums, and cost overruns. It is building bus and rail
systems for spectators that will not be finished until long after the
games are done.

But the World Cup projects are just a part of a bigger national
problem casting a pall over Brazil’s grand ambitions: an array of lavish
projects conceived when economic growth was surging that now stand
abandoned, stalled or wildly over budget.

The ventures were intended to help propel and symbolize Brazil’s
seemingly inexorable rise. But now that the country is wading through a
post-boom hangover, they are exposing the nation’s leaders to withering
criticism, fueling claims of wasteful spending and incompetence while
basic services for millions remain woeful. Some economists say the
troubled projects reveal a crippling bureaucracy, irresponsible
allocation of resources and bastions of corruption.

Huge street protests have been aimed at costly new stadiums being
built in cities like Manaus and Brasília, whose paltry fan bases are
almost sure to leave a sea of empty seats after the World Cup events are
finished, adding to concerns that even more white elephants will emerge
from the tournament.

Brazilians headed home past the
abandoned station for a cable car meant to go to their hilltop favela in
Rio de Janeiro. The mayor rode in the $32 million cable car in 2012,
but it hasn’t functioned since.Credit Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times.

“The fiascos are multiplying, revealing disarray that is regrettably systemic,” said Gil Castello Branco, director of Contas Abertas,
a Brazilian watchdog group that scrutinizes public budgets. “We’re
waking up to the reality that immense resources have been wasted on
extravagant projects when our public schools are still a mess and raw
sewage is still in our streets.”

The growing list of troubled development projects includes a $3.4
billion network of concrete canals in the drought-plagued hinterland of
northeast Brazil — which was supposed to be finished in 2010 — as well
as dozens of new wind farms idled by a lack of transmission lines and
unfinished luxury hotels blighting Rio de Janeiro’s skyline.

Economists surveyed by the nation’s central bank see Brazil’s economy
growing just 1.63 percent this year, down from 7.5 percent in 2010,
making 2014 the fourth straight year of slow growth. While an economic
crisis here still seems like a remote possibility, investors have grown
increasingly pessimistic. Standard & Poor’s cut Brazil’s credit
rating last month, saying it expected slow growth to persist for several
years.

Long stretches of the Transnordestina
railway in northeastern Brazil, begun in 2006, lie deserted. The project
has dislocated villagers, who have not been paid for their destroyed
land.Credit Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times

Making matters tougher for the government, it is an election
year, with a poll last month showing support for President Dilma
Rousseff’s administration falling to 36 percent from 43 percent in
November as sluggish economic conditions persist.

Ms. Rousseff’s supporters contend that the public spending has
worked, helping to keep unemployment at historical lows and preventing
what would have been a much worse economic slowdown had the government
not pumped its considerable resources into infrastructure development.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Ms. Rousseff’s political mentor and
predecessor as president, put many of the costly infrastructure projects
into motion during his administration, from 2003 to 2010. In a recent
interview, he acknowledged that some of the ventures were facing long
delays. But he contended that before he came into office, Brazil had
gone for decades without investing in public works projects, so the
country essentially had to start from scratch.

“We stayed for 20 years without making or developing any public
infrastructure projects,” Mr. da Silva said. “We had no projects in the
drawer.”

Still, a growing chorus of critics argues that the inability to finish big infrastructure projects reveals weaknesses in Brazil’s model of state capitalism.

First, they say, Brazil gives extraordinary influence to a web of
state-controlled companies, banks and pension funds to invest in
ill-advised projects. Then other bastions of the vast public bureaucracy
cripple projects with audits and lawsuits.

Federal money went to build an
extraterrestrial museum in Varginha, in southeast Brazil, where
residents claimed to see an alien in 1996. Stray dogs now shelter in its
rusting carcass.Credit Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times

A tall viewing platform, designed by
the famed architect Oscar Niemeyer, looms over a park in Natal, Brazil,
that was inaugurated in 2008 but was soon abandoned.Credit Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times.

“Some ventures never deserved public money in the first place,” said Sérgio Lazzarini,
an economist at Insper, a São Paulo business school, pointing to the
millions in state financing for the overhaul of the Glória hotel in Rio,
owned until recently by a mining tycoon, Eike Batista. The project was
left unfinished, unable to open for the World Cup, when Mr. Batista’s business empire crumbled last year.

“For infrastructure projects which deserve state support and get it,”
Mr. Lazzarini continued, “there’s the daunting task of dealing with the
risks that the state itself creates.”

The Transnordestina, a railroad begun in 2006 here in northeast
Brazil, illustrates some of the pitfalls plaguing projects big and
small. Scheduled to be finished in 2010 at a cost of about $1.8 billion,
the railroad, designed to stretch more than 1,000 miles, is now
expected to cost at least $3.2 billion, with most financing from state
banks. Officials say it should be completed around 2016.

But with work sites abandoned because of audits and other setbacks
months ago in and around Paulistana, a town in Piauí, one of Brazil’s
poorest states, even that timeline seems optimistic. Long stretches
where freight trains were already supposed to be running stand deserted.
Wiry vaqueiros, or cowboys, herd cattle in the shadow of ghostly
railroad bridges that tower 150 feet above parched valleys.

Children played soccer, left, at the
abandoned cable car station in Rio, built on their old playground. In
the northeast, right, a deserted house sat in the shadows of pillars of
the Transnordestina railway.Credit Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times.

“Thieves are pillaging metal from the work sites,” said
Adailton Vieira da Silva, 42, an electrician who labored with thousands
of others before work halted last year. “Now there are just these
bridges left in the middle of nowhere.”

Brazil’s transportation minister, César Borges, expressed
exasperation with the delays in finishing the railroad, which is needed
to transport soybean harvests to port. He listed the bureaucracies that
delay projects like the Transnordestina: the Federal Court of Accounts;
the Office of the Comptroller General; an environmental protection
agency; an institute protecting archaeological patrimony; agencies
protecting the rights of indigenous peoples and descendants of escaped
slaves; and the Public Ministry, a body of independent prosecutors.

Still, Mr. Borges insisted, “Projects get delayed in countries around the world, not just Brazil.”

Mr. da Silva, who oversaw the start of work on the Transnordestina
eight years ago, was frank about the role of his Workers Party, once the
opposition in Brazil’s National Congress, in creating such delays. “We
created a machinery, an oversight machinery, that is the biggest
oversight machinery in the world,” he said, explaining how his party
helped create a labyrinthine system of audits and environmental controls
before he and Ms. Rousseff were elected.

“When you’re in the opposition, you want to create difficulties for
those that are in the administration,” Mr. da Silva said. “But we forget
that maybe one day we’ll take office.”

A young vaqueiro tended cows below an
abandoned Transnordestina railway bridge. The stalled railroad was
considered necessary for transporting soybean harvests to port.Credit Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times

Some economists contend that the way Brazil is investing may
be hampering growth instead of supporting it. The authorities encouraged
energy companies to build wind farms, but dozens cannot
operate because they lack transmission lines to connect to the
electricity grid. Meanwhile, manufacturers worry over potential
electricity rationing as reservoirs at hydroelectric dams run dry amid a
drought.

Other public ventures sit vacant. Officials in Natal,
in northeast Brazil, spent millions on wavy buildings designed by Mr.
Niemeyer, opening them in 2006 and 2008. But they abandoned them almost
immediately, allowing squatters to occupy some areas; the authorities
now say they have plans to refurbish the buildings. Another Niemeyer
project, a $30 million television transmission tower in Brasília designed like a futuristic flower, remains unused two years after it was inaugurated.

Then there is the extraterrestrial museum in Varginha, a city in
southeast Brazil where residents claimed to have seen an alien in 1996.
Officials secured federal money to build the museum, but now all that
remains of the unfinished project is the rusting carcass of what looks
like a flying saucer.

“That museum,” said Roberto Macedo, an economist at the University of
São Paulo, “is an insult to both extraterrestrials and the terrestrial
beings like ourselves who foot the bill for yet another project failing
to deliver.”

__________________________

Brazil Tracks From Boom to Rust

By
Nadia Sussman

Brazil’s economic boom bore big construction projects to
empower its impoverished interior. But as the economy cools, many are
unfinished, leaving a legacy of division and dislocation.